Listen well, while I tell you a story …. (Part I)

 

Listen well, while I tell you a story…. No, no, not of a boy and a girl in the spring ….. I will not tell you today of princes and princesses, nor will I speak of adventure… today is not for the bloodthirsty gore of pirates…I will not speak of Sindbad and Gulliver today ….  not even the spine-chilling tale of Macbeth ….  Today, I will not tell you the story of the star-crossed Montagues and Capulets …. Not even the tale of that viper Shylock…. Though to do justice to the Bard…. The last mentioned would have in all probability brought us to the same conclusion…. Rather today’s story is uncomfortably too close to home ….. today is the turn of a rather gruesome tale, the tale of a Bleak House…. a house divided by litigation ….. tarry with me a while …. this tale bears repetition … specially in our little paradise that the world calls Goa…. yes, I am narrating the unfortunate saga of the Jarndyce family, who longs and eagerly waits to inherit wealth, no, no… they do not wait patiently at home…. nor do they wait for Plutus or Lakshmi to bless them …. rather they wait in the hallowed courts of the law…. the law suit has been going on and on for generations, with no sign of verdict or settlement, it has “become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means.”

Law suits do appear to go on forever, in life too…  such as the American one of, Oracle v. Google, where the end is never in sight. Today, as I write, I remember the story not for all its elements of a best seller: a love child, an unsuitable pair falling in love, cruel and avaricious relations, drugs and murder, and the inevitable happy ending, or more accurately fairly happy ending, as the inheritance is wiped out by the legal costs! But I remember it as a study of the corruption and malaise of the legal system at the time, and perhaps even of today, where law suits still linger on for generations, bribery and forgery still exist, and the purpose of law appears to be, to enrich its guardians and caretakers.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of Bleak House to the young law aspirant, is not what the law is, but what the law and legal process, ought not to be, and perhaps it nudges us to wonder whether litigation was the only option? Whether there was any other way of solving the dispute?

                                                                                                                                          …..to be continued

Pearl Monteiro